Within the financial industry, equipment which is responsible for handling cash and currency is critical to satisfying the most basic financial functions. Therefore, if this equipment is not available to the financial institution, due to network error, the institution is at risk of not being capable of satisfying the transactional needs of its customers. This lack of redundancy has the potential to significantly reduce customer satisfaction, and ultimately result in loss of clients and revenue.
In the financial industry, financial hardware must communicate across local area and wide area networks to provide its functionality. Furthermore, this financial hardware is typically built on proprietary systems which require custom communication interfaces to communicate with local and distant servers. The current communications between hardware and servers also lacks adequate security measures, such as data protection functionality (e.g. encryption, redundancy, etc.) and redundancy. Increasingly, hardware is driven via internet protocol (IP) and treated as a device on the network. If the connection to the network is lost, the hardware is rendered unusable. In a standard enterprise environment, the weakest point is the communication infrastructure on which the communication and data transfer ride. When this infrastructure is down, the hardware can not be used, which can be a devastating loss to the enterprise.